Asyia Wadud, curator.

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her recent writing appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Chicago Review, Social Text, FENCE, and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (River to River: Four Voices 2020; Governors Island Arts Center residency 2019-2020; Process Space 2017), Danspace Project, Brooklyn Poets, Dickinson House, Mount Tremper Arts, and the New York Public Library, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Curatorial statement 

“The world’s poetic force (its energy) kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting.”

This line from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation often comes to mind as I think about cultivating a space for a series of possible encounters, chance collaborations or lattices to exist. Sometimes there is a trace knowledge that three people might like to know one another because they already share a common language or could use the time to start building one.

Painter Marcus Leslie Singleton, movement-based artist mayfield brooks, and dancer/digital media artist Brittany Engle-Adams are each committed to experimentation as a method and mode. They work across disciplines to keep their own practices dynamic and shifting, and each of them let Blackness and history haunt their work. All three of these artists also trouble the value placed on Black life and they do so in a few registers. Grief is not the static, given state— there is room to acknowledge other states, too. They each let grief gather but everything else, too. 

I am always interested in transmission and proximity and what can happen when things are laid side by side. I return to Marcus, Brittany and mayfield’s work in their nascent conversations and wonder how it’ll continue to develop if they have the time to be together again. Their work also feels distinctly borne of the city and I wonder how the isolation of these past quarantine months and the relative enclosure of the residency time will shape the ways they work and think.